Posts Tagged: Splatterpunk

[My foreword to my novel IN DARKNESS WAITING, for its new edition, seems relevant to our times. And to humanity's perennial dilemma, its persistent question: What is the Nature of Evil?]

Foreword to IN DARKNESS WAITING: The “Director’s Cut”

This edition of In Darkness Waiting has been re-edited. I updated it a little, cut some youthful excess, tinkered with a few sentences and trimmed some slow bits. But it’s essentially the same book, and it definitely has the same theme. It’s a hard-charging horror story—I suspect it would be difficult to find a horror novel with a scene more extreme than the climax of this book—but its subtext is what is most important to me.

Paradoxically, some books seem more relevant as time goes on. Or perhaps their relevance is simply brought into prominence by resonant times. In Darkness Waiting seems to me to be one of those books. Before there was any thought of reprinting IDW, I found myself referring to it, more than once, while writing some recent online opinion pieces. I was writing about the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, as well as the abuse of women and “unbelievers” by Fundamentalist Muslims. How can people stone a woman to death because someone raped her? They do. How can American soldiers gleefully torment and beat and humiliate their prisoners, most of whom had nothing to do with terrorism? They did. When an atrocity comes about, it starts inside the perpetrators. Something happens, in them—a process whereby they dehumanize their victims. Well before the act, the atrocity has begun psychologically—and neurologically.

People are not innately monstrous. Most people can be quite compassionate, sympathetic, in the right circumstances. Yet somehow they can also switch that compassion off—some unknown trigger comes along, and it’s switched off, within them, like switching off a light. As I mention in IDW, Nazis guarding concentration camps tossed bread to hungry, snow-bound birds, feeling genuinely sorry for them, while a few feet away children starved to death, watching enviously as the birds eat crumbs. How can they calmly accept taking part in starving those children, and then feed the birds? Many of these monsters had wives and children they loved. What is the mechanism of the repression of normal human empathy?

There are many examples of dehumanization from American history. In the book The Plutonium Files by Pulitzer Prize winner Eileen Welsome, we learn that in the 1940s thousands of powerless Americans–blacks, institutionalized children, the poor, prisoners, soldiers— were deliberately exposed to plutonium, often in injections, as part of experiments essentially designed to find ways to protect the experimenters from deadly radiation. The researchers worked for the government, on military grants (all done in secret), to try to find ways to protect the developers of nuclear weapons from radiation. So they injected radioactive particles into people; they gave hundreds of children radioactive iron particles, spoonfed to them in oat meal, and then, quite dispassionately, they monitored the health of experimental subjects–eventually, their deterioration–in this effort to protect their own kind. They dehumanized their subjects for the sake of their own survival; to find ways to protect them, the researchers, and people like them, from radiation, at the expense of powerless Americans–who were never told what was happening to them. President Clinton appointed a committee to look into these allegations, and the committee reported its shocking conclusions on the very day that the OJ Simpson trial concluded–perhaps so that the story would be buried in the press, as in fact it was.

In my online piece I wrote: I again call for scientific research into the psychological and neurological mechanism of dehumanization. We need to realize that it’s integral to human behavior–and only through understanding it can we find ways to overcome it.

It is perhaps significant that the original title of this novel was Insect Inside. If we are not careful to make conscious choices, we become insects, inside.

In Darkness Waiting is an entertainment. If you like horror, I think there’s a good chance you’ll find it damned entertaining. (Or should that be “entertainment for the damned”?) But it’s also about something that honestly troubles me. It’s also about real life. Yes: all-too-real life. I gave the phenomenon a name in the book. E.S.S.: Empathy Suppression Syndrome. That clinical label was a strategy to promote the notion that we need to engage in a whole new level of what Gurdjieff and the Buddhists call “self-observation.” We need to observe ourselves as a species, with new objectivity, or we’ll never understand the nature of evil.

And if we don’t understand it, we have no hope of standing against it.

[the following "essay" was originally published in i09 Magazine, online. I posted some excerpts here, but this is the full piece. It's more of a rant, really, than an essay. It's not as substantiated and devastatingly organized as an essay should be. It's more emotionally than rationally argued. It's just how I felt about the world that day and in large part it's how I still feel. I think there's truth in it...BTW if it seems like I'm prejudiced against Florida, it's because I am--since the 2000 Presidential elections. GOP Floridians actively subverted the election and stole the vote. So we got Bush and the Iraq war and a huge deficit and environmental wreckage. Thanks, Florida.]

Splatterpunk Utopia
by John Shirley

And heaven, I think—is too close to Hell…
–The Jesus and Mary Chain, “Darklands”

Yesterday, driving my car to get take-out, I heard a radio report about famine in the horn of Africa. The reported concluded with a rather offhanded remark that struck piercingly home: “Mothers walking to the distant Food Center have had to abandon their weakest child by the road in the hopes of getting to food with their stronger child, so that at least one of the children might survive.”

Immediately after this remark, the station launched into a commercial for Burger King’s “Bacon Whopper”. And immediately after that came an ad for weight loss “lap bands”. No one apologized for this obvious, callous irony. We accept the disconnect. We’re used to it.

Then there’s Florida. It’s a state that serves up plenty of the examples I need.

A few days ago, in Florida, a teenager killed his parents with a hammer, methodically bludgeoning them to death. After laying them out in their bedroom he called his friends up, and announced a beer party at his house. A noisy, well-attended party was held while the bodies of boy’s parents were still cooling upstairs.

Also in scenic Florida, not long ago, several young people beat another child to death over a perceived slight; they then cut the body into pieces and tried to hide it in a lagoon.

A couple of months ago, adolescents in Florida set a boy on fire due to a dispute over an X-Box. The burned child survived, but it was a close thing.

I write dark science-fiction, horrific noir, and horror—and yet it’s difficult for me to keep up with the world. (Or even just Florida).

This is the age when the splatterpunk genre, in film and fiction, has given way to “torture porn”—a derisive term used by critics of films like Saw. Me, I’ve written some quite extreme fiction. Some of my writing—like the novels WETBONES (from eReads, currently) and IN DARKNESS WAITING (Infrapress)– appears to have been among the progenitors of “splatterpunk”, or so I’m told. Some of my fiction is collected in a new book, IN EXTREMIS: THE MOST EXTREME SHORT STORIES OF JOHN SHIRLEY (Underland Press). But I feel confident that even my darkest writing, at its most grotesque, is not salacious; that it is a kind of meaningful protest, a wakeup call–that it at least aspires to be art.

Usually I get a good reviews—though the reviewer might sound a bit shell shocked—but once upon a time a critic in Kirkus discussing my admittedly extreme novel THE VIEW FROM HELL asked, “There are readers who suck his lollipops of pain?” A memorable line! (I’m planning to market some lollipops of pain, at some point.)

Lollipops of pain, if you say so; true splatterpunk, only occasionally; but I’ve never written so-called “torture porn”, in prose or script. Several points sharply distinguish my writing from that sort, but the most obvious is the point of view; there’s always something salacious, something innately sadistic about “torture porn”, a subgenre that crouches in the point of view of the monster and never seriously departs from it. There’s something distinctly sociopathic about it. Movies like The Devil’s Rejects , the Japanese film Audition, the Saw movies, come to mind–they seem eagerly sadistic. The French film Martyrs may have some redeeming social meaning but ultimately it’s torture porn. At best “Torture porn” seems a steam valve for a pressure that should never have built up—and it never has a genuine message. More meaningful examples of extreme fiction and film expose sadism, or the brutal, dehumanizing absurdities of life, without losing a moral center.

Still, I think it unlikely that the basest splatterpunk films, torture porn, or even violent videogames spark the rising violence we’re seeing in people.

(Allow me an aside to dismiss one objection that people glibly fling about regarding the contemporary bubbling up of startling viciousness in surprising numbers of people—the notion that “this kind of thing always happened, it just wasn’t reported in the 1950s and 60s before the age of the 24 hour news cycle”. No, I promise you, any insane act of astonishing violence would have been widely reported in newspapers across the country—and was, on the rare occasions when it happened—with a technology we had at the time. It was something called “telegraphy”. News was sent “on the wire”. We didn’t actually have to use talking drums.)

Perhaps wildly violent entertainment media encourages a hardness, a mean jadedness—but clearly the Columbine killers committed mass murder because they were damaged by something other than media. Common sense tells us that a young man who beats his parents’ brains in and then calls his friends to a beer party doesn’t do it because he watched House of 1000 Corpses or the remake of Halloween–nor because he enjoys playing the very splatterpunk F.E.A.R. 2 videogame.

Where’s the damage coming from, then? Some say it’s environmental—and it’s true that neurotoxins are flowing unhindered all around us; in plastics that leach into our food, in phthalates; in pesticides sprayed on our food, seeped into our water.

But I suspect it’s more to do with a toxic cognitive dissonance, with a poisonous shame–and fundamental emotional disconnection.

Here are two headlines from the new issue of LiveScience magazine: Fatty Comfort Food Lessens Sad Feelings …and, Tech Withdrawal Similar to Giving Up Drinking and Smoking.

There are tons, as it were, of obese people; perhaps a good deal of the cause of the plague of obesity is as simple as sadness, and a misguided attempt to relieve it with fatty foods. How’d they get so sad in the first place? And how caught up in tech do you have to be to suffer actual physical withdrawal?

Meanwhile, an op-ed piece in The New York Times opines that while the internet, smart phones and social media expand our contacts on certain levels, these technologies actually foster a kind of neurotic introversion—it’s all a safe substitute for direct human contact.

Suppose it’s all connected. Suppose it’s the case that people now grow up feeling no real attachment to their families—and no fundamental grasp of their society. Deeply saddened and only fragmentarily socialized, they feel uncomfortable with real intimacy, with face to face friends. Their families, after all, are fragile, often broken by divorce; their parents are confused, angry, disappointed in life. Young people are taught to aim for colleges that thrall them in debt; they’re taught to squirm for expendable jobs that, if they’re lucky, turn out to be dead ends. They’re forced to accept some franchised cog in the cognitive dissonance of corporate civilization as their place in life—but they feel no real connection to it. Every time they start to get some sense of who they might be, another media trend or economic crisis, like an undertow, yanks their identity off its feet—like kicking the legs out from under a toddler who’s just learned to walk. They suffer in increasing numbers from the mysterious plague of ADHD—its cause is unknown but somehow attention deficit seems weirdly designed for the 21st century world.

They eat a bacon Whopper and then hear, perhaps, of people abandoning one child so another child can live—and some of them twist inwardly in shame. To deal with that, they lol about it all online.

The wealthy, the famous, the privileged are ever present in the new media super-reality. The average person feel stunted, humiliated by constant social comparisons, reminders of their own status as “loser”.

They start to simmer with anger inside—when the simmer becomes a boil, they look for media that offers release. The vileness of torture porn– entertainment deliberately designed to be without ethical compass–offers a sluice to funnel away the sudden, painful spurts of venomous fury…

For some it’s not enough. The most damaged become violent psychopaths. They’re people who failed to connect, to bond on the most basic level, with parents hopelessly sucked away into the seething anxieties of corporate civilization. So perhaps they smash their disconnected parents with ball peen hammers and call for a beer party as the blood drips onto the floor upstairs.

Anyway, it’s a theory—a hypothesis about a syndrome of frustration and disconnection enhanced by the ungraspable Teflon surfaces of corporation-defined society.

For too many people, there’s nothing to really relate to, nothing to center on—and when your family chills, far away from you, in Xanax and the Shopping Channel, maybe you want to scream…or set someone on fire.

It seems to me, though, that we’re adapting in a perverse, deformed way. Our corporate civilization is working up its own little splatterpunk utopia. It’s cultivating a new corporate organism and we’re finding our psychopathic places in it. Sure, some can’t take the pressure, and they turn to extremes of violence, like all those men we’ve gotten used to, who kill their families, and then themselves. But most of us accept the palliatives, the catharsis we’re offered.

We’re learning to survive within a societal paradox– a socialized sociopathy. We give up family and real community–and we accept the corporate civilization without protest. We find our place in the splatterpunk utopia.

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Here’s are a few quotes, selections, from an article I wrote, which io9.com is running–Splatterpunk Utopia.

This is the age when the splatterpunk genre, in film and fiction, has given way to “torture porn”-a derisive term used by critics of films like Saw. Me, I’ve written some quite extreme fiction. Some of my writing-like the novels Wetbones (from eReads, currently) and In Darkness Waiting (Infrapress)— appears to have been among the progenitors of “splatterpunk”, or so I’m told. Some of my fiction is collected in a new book, In Extremis: The Most Extreme Short Stories of John Shirley (Underland Press). But I feel confident that even my darkest writing, at its most grotesque, is not salacious; that it is a kind of meaningful protest, a wakeup call—that it at least aspires to be art.
[snip]
… I think it unlikely that the basest splatterpunk films, torture porn, or even violent videogames spark the rising violence we’re seeing in people. Allow me to dismiss one objection that people glibly fling about regarding the contemporary bubbling up of startling viciousness in surprising numbers of people-the notion that “this kind of thing always happened, it just wasn’t reported in the 1950s and 60s before the age of the 24 news cycle”. No, I promise you, any insane act of astonishing violence would have been widely reported in newspapers across the country-and was, on the rare occasions when it happened-with a technology we had at the time. It was something called “telegraphy”. News was sent “on the wire”. We didn’t actually have to use talking drums.

Perhaps wildly violent entertainment media encourages a hardness, a mean jadedness -but clearly the Columbine killers committed mass murder because they were damaged by something other than media. Common sense tells us that a young man who beats his parents brains in and then calls his friends to a beer party doesn’t do it because he watched House of 1000 Corpses or the remakes of Halloween —nor because he enjoys playing the very splatterpunk F.E.A.R. 2 videogame.

[snip]

…But I suspect it’s more to do with a toxic cognitive dissonance, with a poisonous shame—and fundamental emotional disconnection.